Recently, the dovish, leftwing Barack Obama received the support of Teddy Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, and even Maria Shriver, Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the “new son of Camelot", as Terry Moran put it.

All of which of course is staggeringly ironic to anyone who looks at the 1960s with a gimlet eye, considering what a staunch cold warrior, and especially anti-Castro hardliner JFK was. As James Piereson told me last year:

"In 1963, you have a fairly conservative country, culturally," Piereson notes. "You have a communist assassinate the president, a popular president. In 1968, the country has kind of gone off the rails, especially liberal-left culture as you find in the universities, and places like that. The students are taking drugs, and they're demonstrating, and they're rioting against the war in Vietnam.

"Their hero is Castro, and people like Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung," Pierson says, noting the surfeit of Castro and Ché-style army fatigues being worn on campuses. "So how do you get, really, from this place in 1963, where Kennedy is shot by a communist, to '68 where communists like Castro are heroes to the left?"

And much of the left has been frozen in amber, since, as juvenilia such as this illustrates.